A Threat To Straight Marriages

This sounds like a straw man (and one that I often hear in the gay marriage debate):

The anti-gay-marriage argument that simply makes no sense to me is the one that says allowing gay folks to marry will mess up my marriage - my heterosexual marriage. I don't follow the reasoning that gay married couples will undermine the ability of straight married couples to form and sustain marital partnerships.

Perhaps someone has made that argument somewhere, sometime, but I've never seen or heard it myself. It would be helpful if she would provide a link to support the straw man. Of course it makes no sense to her. It makes no sense at all, which is why few people make such an argument.

I think that this may be a perversion of the real argument, which is that, for those uncertain of their sexual orientation, it will weaken societal pressures to have a heterosexual lifestyle and marriage. If society is no longer heteronormative, then a little boy might grow up thinking that it's OK to marry his friend Joey, instead of Sally. Actual homosexuals are going to grow up to be gay regardless, but it's not necessarily a good idea to encourage wavering where it exists. Now, one can argue whether it's a good or bad thing to do so, but that's the argument to be discussed..

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RobertHuntingdon wrote:

Heh. Every time I see an otherwise-intelligent person (like you) espouse the thoroughly discredited theory of genetically-programmed robots who have no choice whatsoever and MUST become homosexuals... I want to laugh, then I want to cry, then I want to scream... but instead today I'll just type.

Life is choice. Including the choice to become a homosexual in the first place (by allowing your mind to think along such patterns) and the choice to act on those impulses once you have established those mental tendencies. It may not be entirely deliberate choice in that you didn't fully understand the full ramifications of what you were getting yourself in for before you started. But you still made a choice... or in (historically, at least) rare cases somebody else made a choice for you by trying to influence you to think a certain way from a very young age. Indeed that's one of the things I dislike so much about the public school indoctrination system. But you can always make a choice to reverse course. Sadly far too many just don't care.

But saying "my genes made me do it" is just as moronic as saying "the devil made me do it". Neither is true, and neither is accepting responsibility for your own actions.

But you are correct that is is a threat to future straight marriages. IMO, intentionally so. The extremists among the heterophobe community knows that their system cannot last without constant recruitment from outside (because they are incapable of breeding) and they will do or say anything to make that recruitment as easy as possible.

I said nothing about genetics, though it certainly hasn't been discredited. At least not by scientists.

Life is choice. Including the choice to become a homosexual in the first place (by allowing your mind to think along such patterns) and the choice to act on those impulses once you have established those mental tendencies.

So, you're saying that if you wanted to, you could do it with a guy, and have a good time?

Another interesting question is should a "Gay Marriage" qualify for a tax credit?

It depends on why we have a tax credit - is it to reimburse families for the expense of having kids? (Trust me - it don't cover that cost!) Is it to incentivize people to settle down and be productive? Is it because Senators are married?

Personally, I think we should do away with the marriage credit - why not just not tax people so much in the first place? But seeing as how lower taxes is not going to happen, should a homosexual couple receive incentives to get married?

From what I've heard in social conservative circles, I think you're right that the argument is more about future marriages than current ones. But this about the marginal heterosexual is new to me. The arguments I've heard have been that traditional marriage is good for men, women, and society, but that men are increasingly reluctant to marry and having marriage percieved as a 'gay' institution will make men less likely to marry in the marginal case. You also hear the argument that its important that marriage be understood not just as a form of companionship but as a social institution with procreative and child-rearing functions and that instituting gay marriage weakens this understanding in the marginal case.

I dunno. There's something a bit strange about lots and lots and lots of folks saying that it'll threaten marriage in general, but no, not mine, nosireebob.

I'm sure, this being a big country, there are some bi people so "on the cusp" who might, if they had a choice, marry either a man or a woman if it were lawful to do so, and choose the less popular (in at least many circles) choice just out of stubbornnness, but I'm not sure that setting societal policy around that makes a lot of sense.

I haven't checked -- are we seeing differently declining rates in straight marriage in New Jersey, Connecticut, and California than we are elsewhere?

I read somewhere that in some euro nations that did allow gay marrage, they saw straight marrage rates drop well over 90+ %. Something about it redefined the concept of Marage to the point that it just didn't seem significant to folks anymore.

NO idea where I heard that anymore, or if really it was just a coincidence and the fact normal marrages ment less to folks in general, non married and gay married became exceptable at the same time.

It was not a coincidence, but neither was it a causation. Gay marriage is legal in Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. All three countries have historically low marriage rates, but that was already the case before marriage was legalized. There has been no noticeable drop in marriage rates since it was. More likely, the fact that people (gay or straight) in these countries already viewed marriage as relatively unimportant, extending it to gay couples was politically no big deal.

I've been trying to think of how someone could feel that their marriage was personally threatened. It occurred to me that if you felt like your marriage was a kind of social approval or social distinction, you might feel it was being devalued if the same distinction was going to be extended to an even larger group of people than before, especially if this was a group that you personally found distasteful or that still had overtones of being socially suspect. I guess you might analogize it to how 2d Lieutenants who came up through West Point or the ROTC might feel if the decision was made to make all soldiers who were being discharged due to mental illness honorary 2d Lieutenants. This also helped me understand something that had puzzled me, which was the distinction folks seemed to make between civil unions and marriages. Perhaps your 2d Lieutenants wouldn't mind if shell shock victims were given the pay and other practical perquisistes of 2d Lieutenants, but they would mind if they were made 2d Lieutenants. Just a thought.

My basic worry about these kinds of things. I don't know how to make a working society. I've read about a lot of ways to create a non-working society, and not too many about different ways to make a working society. We seem to have a working society currently, though I have my doubts about it at times.
I am basically libertarian in thoughts about how one should organizing man's social/economic interactions, but I am conservative in wanting to making changes that might destabilize society. A collapsing society takes longer than a lifetime to repair or replace. I don't want to live out the end of my life in one.

Here in CA, anyway, I take this proposition to be more about who defines legal terms than about the terms themselves. I'm offended that the judiciary has arrogated the role of defining the legal term "marriage" in clear contravention of the stated will of the electorate.

If you want to marry a goat, two ducks, and a piano bench it doesn't bother me at all. Tell me that the Judiciary is the proper arm of government to define terms and we've got a disagreement.

Anyone seriously concerned about the institution of marriage, should look at the divorce rate, and address *that.* (And by finding out *why* it is, not by simply making divorce harder to obtain. People often bring the wrong expectations to marriage. I suspect same-sex ones will be no different, and forbidding them won't change that.)

I have long maintained that the appropriate "solution" is to sunder the ties between Church and State w.r.t. marriage.

Churches can define matrimony as they wish, and offer that sacrament to couple (groups?) that meet those defined criteria.

The State can decide what benefits, priveleges, and entitlements accrue to couples / groups(?) that meet the legislatively crafted criteria for "civil unions" or whatever the name of the week is for it.

And I agree w/ Mr. Ward that the "Yes on 8" folks are motivated substantially by the arrogance of the state judiciary to create "rights" that have never existed before.

Just as Roe V. Wade undercut the legislature (paraphrasing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), so to has the California Supreme court undercut the California Legislature. In both cases, the "evolving consensus" so important to certain strands of jursiprudence got short-circuited.

For those mis-creants who are okay with that sort of structural demolition of law because they got their way, I can only offer this thought:

"The end result is the loss of the rule of law, and a return to the rule of the power over the powerless. If your marksmanship skills aren't honed, you might wanna get started on it."

RobertHuntingdon said: "The extremists among the heterophobe community knows that their system cannot last without constant recruitment from outside (because they are incapable of breeding) and they will do or say anything to make that recruitment as easy as possible."

This might be one of the silliest theories I've ever seen, if it's serious(?). Clearly Robert you've never heard of a genetic trait that confers benefits in some situations and hurts in others. Ever heard of sickle cell anemia? How about allergies? In particular, this one's been pretty conclusively studied, such that a X-chromosome genetic trait which causes women to have greater fertility but men with the same condition to have a predeliction for same-sex attraction would not only survive in a heterosexual society, but survive for ever.

I say this as a conservative catholic who believes homosexual acts tend to be psychologically damaging to the inidividual and, done in the open, not healthy for society either(and in some cases every bit as damaging as the repressed tendencies of a closeted gay, although for different reasons.)

I read once, in a book about male dominance in hierarchical settings, that studies of chimps in the 70s indicated that an over-exposure to opposite-sex hormones in utero would definitively alter the embryo's sexual orientation from hetero- to homo-. If that's the case with 'natural' gays in humanity then it would be biology, but not genetics per se that was the cause.

While I, personally, believe this to be the cause of *most* avowed homosexuality (and hence beyond the control of the individuals in question), I don't believe that *all* people who engage in homosexuality are biologically programmed that way. Many might just do it for the kink, or as a way to exert dominance, or as a result of a psychological trauma.

In any case, in re: gay "marriage", I see marriage as an institution that exists primarily because humans reproduce sexually. IE, it's all about children. Even when straight couples don't want to, or can't, have children, male-female couples are still the way to bet when it comes to producing a new generation, and society has a vested interest in producing a new generation. Whereas any hypothetical benefits of gay marriage have yet, AFAIK, to be demonstrated to justify the re-definition of a long-standing social institution.

Katie Granju (and Rand) need to wake up and smell the coffee. The legalization of gay marriage is not an end in itself, but is only a steppingstone in the "progressive agenda" to undermine all marriage. You can decide for yourself whether you think this will succeed or not, but you should make yourself aware that this is the agenda -- because in the end, that is the only practical way to oppose this agenda.

A revealing look into the progressive mindset was provided back in 2004 by Lisa Duggan in "The Nation". She wrote an article called "Holy Matrimony!" on this subject. Here is the link:

"The moral conservative's nightmare vision of a flexible menu of options might become a route to progressive equality! That could happen--if all statuses could be opened to all without exclusions, allowing different kinds of households to fit state benefits to their changing needs; if no status conferred any invidious privilege or advantage over any other, or over none at all; and if material benefits such as health insurance were detached from partnership or household form altogether (federally guaranteed universal healthcare, for instance, would be far more democratic and egalitarian than health insurance as a partnership benefit)."

In other words, gay marriage is just one lockpick in the dishonorable process of dismantling traditional marriage.

FWIW after being married for nearly 20 years, I've learned that marriage is not just about hanging out with someone you like. It is about providing a stable, risk-mitigated instrument for the raising of children. That's it. In the long term this is marriage's primary benefit for society.

You are missing the point that marriage evolved to provide a stable home for children. Anything I have read so far is based on getting tax incentives, but not to provide for children. Gay couples hardly ever produce children, but most heterosexual couples do. The kids are why we married couples get incentives. If you want a tax break, raise a kid or two. Then you have earned it. If not, support those of us who are building for the future.

Sure, Rand, you may not have "explicitly" said so, but you are far too smart for that kind of dodge. You said "actual homosexuals will grow up to be gay regardless". Twist and dodge all you want, but your words don't leave any plausible interpretation but that they were already "unchangeably" gay before they "grew up" / became sexually aware. (Because we both fully know that kids start out asexual barring severe psychological damage.) There is only one plausible way to claim somebody is "already" a certain way before they even begin to approach puberty, that being that they are already "programmed" that way. And unless that programming is mental, as I claim it is, then it must be genetic. That may not be what you thought you intended, but that was what your own words support.

Such genetic programming is pure crap. And not only that, but even their own movement knows its crap. Look up "fistgate" if you get bored sometime. They not only know it's crap but they even know they have proven it so by their own actions and words. Their words leave no fair interpretation but to say that they know it is a mental state that they must train people into, and the only way to do it is to get them to "experiment" and try it out, hoping that by trying for young enough kids they can catch them while they are still easily impressionable and it will stick.

Now tendencies may theoretically exist like tom tries to claim above, but even if they do they still do not excuse you of the requirement that you choose for yourself whether to follow them or not. If you have no choice in the matter, then you are no longer a human and are just a robot/animal, a slave to your programming or instincts. Please be clear that I am not saying that they are, I am saying that this theory claims they are, because it does. That is demeaning, dehumanizing, and wrong. It is just as morally bankrupt an argument as racial slavery and Jim Crow crap in the 1700s to 1950 or so, just as wrong and dehumanizing as claiming that Jews are a sub-race and need to be rounded up for extermination in death camps, just as wrong and dehumanizing as every "sub-human" or "master race" argument in the history of mankind, including putting down "whitey" today because they are supposedly "too racist" to vote for you-know-who. All of the above examples are morally bankrupt crap.

No, it is a choice, just like everything else in life. And yes, were I to allow myself to spend time watching gay porn, thinking of gay guys I'd like to make my boyfriend, etc., yes I very much could choose to become a gay person. It would not happen overnight, but were I to choose that course I could eventually "overcome" my deep-seated disgust at the thought of anal sex and/or a man sucking another man's "equipment" and become quite happily gay. Some, nay, many people, do exactly that because we as a society make so much effort to bend over backwards to avoid harming the "pwecious feewings" of gays that we make it insanely easy for others who are not yet gay to become so. (Lets leave aside, for now, those who become so after massive emotional trauma such as a horrific divorce or rape or something... not that they aren't exactly the same thing but this is already far too long as it is.) And at any point along that process, including after the initial conversion was complete, I could choose to reverse course, and with time, effort, and determination, I could reverse that trend. Very few people are interested in making that effort, primarily because as a society we place almost zero pressure on them to do so. But please don't just take my word for it. There are plenty of people out there who have done exactly that and are happy to tell you their story, look some of them up.

Oops, Rand, it seems I slightly misquoted you, my apologies. If you substitute "are going to" for "will" in my above post's second sentence, however, then the quote should become fully accurate (and I think the meaning of it is still unchanged).

And another slight typo... a missing word... comparatively very few people are willing to make the effort to reverse course from homosexuality...

If you get bored please feel free to edit those into my post. Otherwise those of you who read please substitute mentally.

I was born heterosexual. Nothing in my post-birth environment made me that way. You can indulge yourself in this strange fantasy if you like, but there's zero scientific basis for it.

Are you saying that you could, through "therapy," decide you like guys? I couldn't. I'd take Rosie Palms, every time.

I find it amusing that conservatives (assuming you are one) are opposed to the notion of the "blank slate" on every aspect of humanity, other than sexual orientation. Do you believe that everyone is born with the same intrinsic IQ as well? Or adult height? Or hair color Or...gender? Are these also completely changeable by post-birth environment?

No, it is a choice, just like everything else in life. And yes, were I to allow myself to spend time watching gay porn, thinking of gay guys I'd like to make my boyfriend, etc., yes I very much could choose to become a gay person.

OK, then unlike me, you're not heterosexual. You're bi. Because there's no way in hell, or this side of it, that I could do that, no matter how many hours of watching disgusting gay porn I would watch.

You prove my thesis--that people who believe this nonsense are bisexual, and have no concept of what it means to be either heterosexual or homosexual, but they project their own bisexual orientation on others.

> == You can indulge yourself in this strange fantasy if you like,
> but there's zero scientific basis for it.

Your completly correct that the person your respondnig to is quoting a popular, and long disproved scientifically, idea that everything we are (in particular here sexual orientation) is just a choice or cultural training. Hell you can prove genetic components for preferences in hair styles and foods even if raised in EXCTREAMLY different cultural/social environments.

You can train your self to do it anyway (guys in prison, folks psycologically scared/conditioned who go the other way - or some really weird way, etc) but if you wire them up to see what unconsiously is pushing their buttons and getting the juices flowing, for both men and women you get a very clear resopnce regardless of what they tell you or beleave about themselves.

Thats a political hot potatoe with some gays who want to push the idea that everyone is both ways they just are most honest, etc. But reality doesn't conform to desires or political whims.

Projection is a two-way accusation Rand. And quite often the first to make the accusation is actually the one guilty of it. One day you will realize I was right. Until then, think you've won and "put me in my place" if it makes you feel better. But you are still wrong.

You misread me quite badly and used a blatantly false definition for the word "asexual". Asexual does not mean they have a "blank slate" that anything can be written on. Asexual means they start off with no interest in sex. Look it up in just about any dictionary, and as soon as you get past the raw biological definitions of "lacking sex organs" (which obviously does not apply) and stuff having to do with raw cells splitting (which is obviously inapplicable) the very next definition is exactly what I say. And this is absolutely 100% proven true, your claims to the contrary notwithstanding. And until psychological damage of some sort or another comes into play, they are all destined to become heterosexual. Including you and me. But they aren't actively interested in that yet.

Only a complete fool would think that hair color can be determined by how you think. You insult me by suggesting otherwise and yourself by even attempting such a moronic insult. But once the mind becomes involved, anything is possible within the realm of the mind. You cannot wish your way to a few extra inches of height because that is not part of the mind. But even a person who is not very intelligent naturally-speaking can, with extremely hard work and dedication, train themselves to appear smarter than somebody whose greater natural gifts were untrained and untested, or at least less well-developed. And sexual orientation, or even psychological gender (how you act, not what you are genetically speaking) can be adjusted if a person is badly enough psychologically damaged or strongly enough mentally determined.

If tendencies are involved in some way such that supplements are needed to restore proper balance of the chemicals in the brain, that still does not mean that you are not responsible for your actions. It's a mitigating circumstance, yes, but not an absolving circumstance. There is a difference between those two. If there was not, people who are found "not guilty by reason of insanity" would be immediately set free to do whatever they wanted. They are not, they are required to get treatment. Being homosexual is not a crime, but that does not mean that being so is not a mental state that cannot be corrected.

After the hormones become activated, they either become interested heterosexually or homo- or "confused" as some put it. That is ALL controlled by the mind. The hormones activate that kind of thinking, but the thinking is still consciously controllable. You think gay porn is disgusting. So do I. But that does not mean that if you watched it long enough it would not become "normal" to you. It would. Sorry to bust your prideful bubble, but it's true. I wouldn't recommend you try it of course.

Other means of making this conversion exist. Porn in general can be part of it. Role-playing a female character if you're male or vice-versa can do it. And there are plenty more options as well. Eventually, with enough bizarre input your mind will become "diseased" enough that you will find guys attractive. I'm not talking about the process of a few days. I'm talking of the process of years, and if you keep at it long enough it WILL happen. I should thank Kelly for proving my point for me in that you CAN train yourself to do it if you try hard enough, but she neglects to admit that after you've done it long enough you WILL start to like it. It will become "natural" to your now-diseased mind.

I won't waste my time or yours any further. Your mind is obviously made up and unwilling to listen. So be it.

And quite often the first to make the accusation is actually the one guilty of it.

[laughing]

One day you will realize I was right.

How will that occur? Because I'll go nuts?

You are projecting your bisexuality (ability to enjoy sex with either gender) on me. I am not projecting my (innate) heterosexuality on you. I take you at your word. So it's not a "two-way accusation."

After the hormones become activated, they either become interested heterosexually or homo- or "confused" as some put it. That is ALL controlled by the mind. The hormones activate that kind of thinking, but the thinking is still consciously controllable.

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This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on October 28, 2008 7:36 AM.